It’s 2023, we are witnessing a huge shift towards clean energy and tons of money and research is being poured into renewables.
But it’s got me thinking, if we did this 20-30 years ago would all the new technology we see today be pretty standard by 2023? Or has there been some big innovations in recent years that would’ve only had been possible in recent times?
A couple examples
Batteries, we are still yet to fully utilise these for energy grid storage and electric vehicles are only now just getting up to the range that a petrol car can do. Would that have been possible in the past considering the first commercial lithium ion battery was released in the 90s?Solid state batteries seem to be like a real boost for renewables yet they are still to be properly used.
Solar panels, wind turbines and other power generation technology. Would they be stock standard or was their efficiency and cost just not possible to overcome until recent times?
Airplanes and other long haul transport, biofuels are what seems to the most likely alternative unless batteries get much better. But these seem to be much later down the track.
In: 403
Yes. Both the problems (or most of them) and at least some solutions have been known for decades for our biggest challenges. A few even date back to the earliest dates of oil & gas if not earlier but for various reasons they were sidelined at the large scale.
For instance, there were electric cars in the 1920s but pretty quickly the manufacturers dropped them. You could only get one if you were a hobbyist and built your own, or if you built one in a university class or something like that, the major producers adamently refused to even do much research (never mind manufacture) until just recently, a delay of only about 90 years.
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